Steve Eder

MANTI Te'o, Notre Dame's star linebacker, was one of the feel-good stories of the 2012 United States college football season, excelling on the field despite the deaths of his grandmother and his girlfriend, he said, within hours of each other.

On Wednesday, that story fell apart when the website Deadspin published an article saying that Te'o's girlfriend never existed.

Notre Dame said in a statement that Te'o was the victim of ''what appears to be a hoax in which someone using the fictitious name Lennay Kekua apparently ingratiated herself with Manti and then conspired with others to lead him to believe she had tragically died of leukaemia''.

Te'o released his own statement, saying he was the target ''of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies'', calling the situation ''painful and humiliating''.

At a news conference on Wednesday night, Jack Swarbrick, Notre Dame's athletic director, said Te'o received a phone call in early December from a number that he thought to be Kekua's. The voice on the phone was one he had believed to be hers, and the person was telling Te'o that she was not dead.

Te'o and his family told the university about the situation on December 26, Swarbrick said, at which point Notre Dame asked an independent investigative company to look into the matter.

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Much remains unclear about whether Te'o was duped or if he somehow perpetrated the fictitious story of having a girlfriend who died during the season. But it is clear that Te'o and the university were well aware of the situation during the onslaught of news media coverage during the lead-up to the national championship game on January 7. Neither corrected the record until the Deadspin article was published.

Swarbrick said it was his understanding that, until the Deadspin article was published, Te'o and his family planned to make a public statement about the situation next week. On January 3, four days before the national championship game, Te'o was asked directly about how the commotion and excitement of the football season helped him cope with the deaths of his girlfriend and grandmother. ''I think whenever you're in football, it takes your mind off a lot of things,'' he said, not directly mentioning the girlfriend.

Swarbrick said there was no attempt to conceal the story.

''This story was coming out,'' he said. ''There was too much online chatter about it.''

Swarbrick said the university investigation found that the motive for creating a fake persona to trick Te'o had simply been the sport of it.

Te'o said that over an extended period of time, he had developed an emotional relationship with a woman he met online. He did not say whether they had met in person, but he did say that they had maintained a relationship online - and on the phone, ''and I grew to care deeply about her''.